My favourite top 10 of IT-related bullshit

Quite naive one, I'd say. Sadly, it sometimes doesn't work even in the world of IT (supposedly based on scientific & engineering fundamentals), especially near the boundaries between engineering & other disciplines where everyone considers himself an expert (or at least pretends to be one).

So let's have some fun - what is your favorite IT-related bullshit you keep hearing about on & on again? You can interpret "favorite" in any way that amuses you: the most annoying, the funniest, the most ridiculous, just WHAT-E-VER you fancy.

Here are my favs (& I have a feeling that it is not the final list ... there may be some additions coming ;>).

Enjoy.

Microservices = thin layer of sexy cream on the top of stinking legacy

"There's no need in changing anything within existing team - what we have to do is to hire a devopsish DevOps. (S)he has to be very devopsy & very skillful in terms of devopsology. Then we're good. And devopsastic. And what is the most important, our current development velocity remains unaffected."

Enterprise Scrum (in IT dept only, of course)

"Oh, Scrum is so amazing, it's like a totally new quality of work - we meet at dailies, we have unlimited sticky notes, we estimate in story points instead of mandays, our team leaders are now known as Scrum Masters and we don't do UAT but Hardening Sprints. Well, we've omitted Retrospectives & still release to production once every 4 months, but Product Owner is OK with that, at least this is what he says when we meet him to get the requirements sign-off."

Component re-use as a mecca for cost savers

"We can only use this one type of DB, because our logistics has negotiated discount on licensing fees 5 years ago. No upgrades until 2019, sorry."

"This was supposed to be a short, three views-long wizard, but we've pro-actively foreseen future requirements, so we've expanded the concept to generic wizard-generating CMS engine, equipped with business rule DSL, multi-platform visualization & ... It won't take 2 weeks, but we're sure we'll be able to benefit of it some day in future ..."

"Nononono, you can't use that. There's already an SMS sending component everyone is supposed to use as there's such a (stand up!) policy (at ease!). And I don't really care that you'd like to receive not send. Or that you're interested in e-mails, not SMSes ..."

Open Source means "free software"

"Yes, let's use OSS. It's free as there are no licensing costs & there is no need for any maintenance considerations. If we'll be missing a feature or something, we'll build it into local copy, so no-one will benefit our unique & market-disturbing contribution. Anyway, we couldn't share something our business has paid for!"

Key metric in software developer's competence is the length of her/his exposure to particular tech

"To do this we'll need some Rails programmers. This module is 'med' complexity, while the other one is 'high', so we'll need two 'resources': one with 3 years of Rails experience & the other one with at least 5."

"Oh, we can do this by dividing application landscape in tiers - this way we'll have very Agile, modern, 'digital' front-end User Experience, without sacrificing reliability, performance & robustness of battle-proven back-ends. Ohh, you want a new feature, not refreshed CSS? Sorry, maybe next year ..."

Model / tool / method that has worked for company XYZ will work anywhere else (you want it to)

"Spotify does it like that, hence it has to be right."

"Netflix uses ChaosMonkey, so should we ... on our corporate Wiki."

"We don't really know why this didn't work out for us, but hey - PInterest uses Finagle, maybe that will help us?"

Pretty much everything in building software products can be outsourced

"Automated tests? We'll outsource it to India! Maintenance? Near-shore body leasing. We don't have capacity to build this application in 6 months? Then let's split it into modules, so each of them can be delivered by separate vendor ... (aura of grief, sorrow, sadness & depression approaches ...)"

"This time we'll do it like we've always wanted to, it will be perfect ..."

... & re-usable, & super-fast, & according to all the known patterns, & ...

;DDDDDDD #ROTFL

And here are the noteworthy runners-up:

Innovation & research in organization should be siloed & "departamentalized"

"Continuous XYZ? DevOps? We don't need anything of that - our clients don't ask for new release twice a day."

Teams that consist of random peeps who don't know each other are real, fully performing teams since the day they are formed

Change effectively happens because someone (sufficiently high-ranking) said so

The more someone is experienced with particular tech, the more accurate her/his estimations get

Separation of duties is a good way to build quality & security

Do you agree? I guess you may have your own candidate list - feel free to slap it in the comments below.